I’ve noticed that almost every time that the phrase "playing God" is used, it’s in a negative way. That is, the choice is to let someone die by stopping medical treatment. There is very little discussion about "playing God" the opposite way using medical technology to keep someone alive.
You could argue that any medical intervention to keep someone alive is playing god, but I’ll limit it to what doctors call "heroic measures". At the end of life, you can sign a living will or DNR order which says that doctors will not use these "heroic measures" to keep you alive.
You sign this if you believe that your life is coming to a natural end, and want to die peacefully. North American culture has a belief that any medical intervention to save a life is worthwhile, unless specifically not requested.
The situation of Terri Schiavo is somewhat different. It seems that her brain is severely damaged, but enough is working that her body can keep itself alive without direct medical intervention. She cannot feed herself, and is kept alive by being fed through a tube. Still, one could argue that doctors have been "playing God" by keeping her alive all these years by providing that feeding tube. The decision to remove that tube is exactly the same kind of "life or death" decision as the one to insert the tube in the first place. Just the outcome would be different. I think the debate can’t be balanced until we realize how far medical technology has gone in keeping people alive who would have died a generation ago.
A more problematic case is that of extremely premature babies. It’s now possible to keep a baby alive even it’s reached little more than half of a regular pregnancy. Almost all of these children will have severe physical and mental disabilities. It takes huge amounts of money and effort to care for these infants to keep them alive and support them throughout their life. Yet those who wouldn’t save them are accused of "playing God", when this extreme medical intervention didn’t exist five years ago. Should we save their life just because we can? We’re playing God both ways.
I’m not saying that premature babies shouldn’t live. I think there’s a limit to what we should do versus we can do. I feel that in these cases we’ve already gone too far and that we need to make choices instead of being ruled by what medical technology is capable of.
My daughter was born 4 weeks premature perfectly healthy. I have friends who had an extremely premature baby. He went from one medical crisis to another until he just over a year old, and his brain stopped from the damaged caused by dozens of strokes. This is an absolutely horrible situation for everybody involved, including the baby, to go through. Was it right to try an keep him alive throughout his short life? A difficult question, but I don’t think it was ever explicitly asked. It if was me, I don’t know what I’d decide, but perhaps being given the choice is a start.
